It may be necessary to remind younger readers that there was once a guy named Dan Rather, who worked at CBS News and was considered kind of important. Then in the middle of the 2004 election campaign, Rather decided to recycle a stale, bogus smear against President Bush, got caught, and was ushered off the national network platform he had disgraced for decades by his dishonest partisan bias. The Dan Rather file at Newsbusters is extensive.

“Good reporting and sourcing is in steep decline . . . We now have the new Internet . . . It remains so susceptible to manipulation, deception and distraction that it allows lies to get started and then spread like mildew in a damp basement.”

Comments

Dan Rather is still around? I didn’t think that there was that much formaldehyde in the world.

JDP

Shapiro’s the guy who shot himself in the foot with the “Friends of Hamas” thing and gave places like MSNBC an easy target. Rather’s own ideology and his own gullibility eight years ago is sorta irrelevant

http://deadcitizensrightssociety.wordpress.com/ rmnixondeceased

We don’t want him, we have enough liars and cheats already. I have also preemptively blocked him from my press pool.

Esau’s Message

What is irrelevant is bringing up Shapiro and Friends of Hamas in relation to this post. If you have a problem with Shapiro or Breibart or the Friends of Hamas story, go over to that site. Make comments on those articles.

Esau’s Message

Dan Rather will never, ever forgive the Internet for ruining his career. And what’s really galling to him is that the Internet simply doesn’t care and has moved on.

The clip I remember is not on You Tube anymore, apparently. It showed Rather in an easy chair at home, swigging Jack and when Dubya came on the tube, he wave a pistol around trying to aim through his alcohol haze, then shoots the TV.

I’m sure it was fake, but, most likely, quite accurate.

Quartermaster

I had just about forgotten Dan “fake but accurate” Rather, and you had to go and remind me he is still wasting oxygen and water.

That’s what Rather was talking about, Shapiro’s failure to check the facts.

http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

The old Big Media complaint about bloggers and Drudge were that they lacked the “layers of editors and fact-checkers” the MSM employed. Beginning almost that very moment, MSM has shown that they no longer had any fact-checkers and their editors are just leftist propaganda hacks.

But Rathergate wasn’t about a fact-checking error. The ONLY source for their story was a known kook with a history of animus towards the Bush family. He gave them an obvious fake letter and they failed to check it out at all. Had they done so, they would have discovered Col. Killian didn’t even type short memos.

But it was one in a long line of stories MSM found “too good to check.” Rather was busted and humiliated, but if anything the quality of reporting has continued to deteriorate since. It seems we will have to wait for the MSM to all go out of business to see their hackery end.

The good news is they are rushing toward that day ever faster.

crosspatch

I’m surprised Dan isn’t getting involved with the whole Liberal Grouch thing in order to get his name back in the spotlight. Everyone else seems to be.

JDP

yep

http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

That was probably just me, on any given night after I forget to change the channel when the news comes on.

That is most definitely not what he’s talking about. Dan is once again on his butt-hurt rant about how the Internet destroyed his career. It is simply irrelevant what the question was.

And it wasn’t fact checking that was the problem with Shapiro. His post was properly hedged, as these things should be. It was running the post at all; that was the problem. He should have waited for corroboration and better developed the story first. News judgment, not fact checking.

Dan Rather proved long ago that he has no foundation on which to criticize anybody’s reporting, ever. And just incidentally, Breitbart has done yeoman’s work on reporting the various problems with the Hagel nomination. CBS (Dan’s former employer) has done squat. If Friends of Hamas was the only mistake Breitbart made, then that’s pretty dang good.

http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

Or me.

GOODSTUFF

“Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

1986, as Rather was walking along Park Avenue in Manhattan to his apartment, he was attacked and punched from behind by a man who demanded to know, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”, while a second assailant also chased and beat him. As the assailant pummeled and kicked Rather, he kept repeating the question over and over again. In describing the incident, Rather said, “I got mugged. Who understands these things? I didn’t and I don’t now. I didn’t make a lot of it at the time and I don’t now. I wish I knew who did it and why, but I have no idea.”

The incident and Rather’s account led some to doubt the veracity of Rather’s story, although the doorman and building supervisor who rescued Rather fully confirmed his version of events. The story entered popular lore and remained unsolved for some time

1997, a TV critic writing in the New York Daily News solved the mystery, and published a photo of the alleged assailant, William Tager. Rather confirmed the story: “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the person.” “William Tager’s identity as the man who attacked Mr. Rather was established in the course of an investigation by my office”, said New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau.

Tager was sentenced to a 25-year prison sentence for killing NBC stagehand Campbell Montgomery outside The Today Show studio in 1994. He was paroled in October 2010 and is believed to be living in New York City.

Quartermaster

Y’all down in the Lone Star state do remember that Dan is from Texas, don’t you?